He quickly assessed his current situation and the surroundings. The wolf continued to circle the ice shelf, which had stopped rising, at about thirty-three feet high.
At first, he couldn't make sense of all these actions, but now he understood: the temperature had dropped suddenly, it was bitterly cold, and the wind was beginning to pick up.
The mana in the surrounding area was gathering in a spiral.
It was forming a freezing storm.
And Cassian couldn't stop it, not because he didn't want to, but because he understood that he had to focus most of his attention on the new aberration in front of him.
"jijijiji!"
It wasn't like the others. This one was a head taller than the others, and strangest of all, its face had a certain coherence.
It wasn't completely distorted or deformed. It wasn't human, but it was recognizable. It had antennae, compound eyes, mandibles, everything an insect would have, although he couldn't specify which one specifically. It was a mixture of ant, mantis, and bee.
Its body was also coherent. Despite the bulging veins, tumors, and twisted flesh, the creature maintained a functional figure.
A narrow waist, long insect legs, and four arms sprouting from its shoulders.
It was ugly, monstrous... but less grotesque and aberrant than the others.
From a distance, it looked like a bipedal insect.
And then Cassian noticed something peculiar: it wasn't one sapling that the aberration had. It was two, one on each scythe.
And those same ones were coming at him again with the intention of slitting his throat.
Cassian braced himself, but a tingling sensation ran through his abdomen. He looked down quickly.
There were the aberration's spiky arms, he thought they would disintegrate like any part that didn't have the sapling, but that's when he realized.
At the point where the stinger joined the arm, there were also sapling.
That's why they didn't come apart and start moving.
That was not a good thing at all.
Cassian acted immediately, moving his arms of darkness to attack them, while with the others he planned to block the incoming attack.
He didn't know exactly what those limbs would do.
Would they generate new aberrations? Would they invade his body further? Whatever it was, he wouldn't give them the chance.
He had two within reach and he had to destroy them.
He reasoned that if he managed to destroy the core, and all the cores of all of them, he would kill that aberration that looked like a living hive.
But when Cassian felt the tingling sensation, he was already a step behind. The stingers moved abruptly and, instead of creating more aberrations or clinging more tightly to his flesh, they detached themselves.
They were violently drawn toward the body of the aberration, which was now a meter away from Cassian.
It all happened in an instant.
But he had no intention of letting that opportunity slip away so easily.
Before they were out of reach, he thought about catching both seedlings, but he risked failing if he went for both, so he decidedly focused on just one.
The shadow hands closed around that twisted flesh. Although it was slippery and elusive, his arms held it tightly.
And the moment they did, black thorns sprouted from them, piercing the piece of flesh from various angles.
Crack!
He destroyed it. He didn't try to recover the core; he had no margin for that. Better to finish it all off.
"jijijijiji!"
Meanwhile, the aberration was already upon him. Everything was happening at breakneck speed."
Cassian prepared himself. Now the creature had three arms... no, four. Another had grown in place of the destroyed one, although without a seedling.
To defeat it, he had to tear them all off and destroy the remaining three.
His tattoos slid down to cover the wound on his abdomen. They wouldn't heal him, but they would prevent him from losing more blood. He didn't care about the poison.
Clang!
With that first impact, the brutal clash began.
Klang! Clang!! Clash!
A frantic exchange began between the two, with Cassian responding to each attack from the aberration's four limbs with his own four limbs.
The mastery with which he wielded those newly created limbs was illogical. It was the first time he had used that power himself, and yet it flowed as if he had always done so.
But there was a reason, for Yeling the shadow and the darkness were like an extension of her, something she had always lived with.
This fusion allowed Cassian to feel the same: it was like an absolute extension of his body, especially the darkness that clung to his body.
And when it came to controlling his own body, no one was better than Cassian.
They were like a perfect union...
KRAK! Clang! Crack Clink!
It was four arms against four arms; the intensity of the clash was increasing.
The upper scythes of the aberration lashed out with force, while the lower spikes sought to pierce him.
Cassian countered with his knife of darkness, clashing and cutting in a frenzy.
Vrrrmmm! Shrrrk!
The air vibrated around them; the ice beneath their feet cracked and broke, but Cassian felt it as solid ground, withstanding every impact.
They attacked and clashed without stopping. The ice platform became a mess that barely supported them.
Each clash sent sparks of dark energy and fragments of ice flying.
Clang! Clink! Crack!
It was a fast and fierce exchange; Cassian occasionally managed to wound the aberration, but it was useless unless it was a blow to its cores, and the difficulty of hitting them was immense.
The aberration also wounded Cassian, although they were only scratches, and the deeper ones he covered with darkness.
The clash was intense and balanced: strength, speed, reflexes, everything seemed equal.
"jijijijiji"
Skrrkk! Klang!
But Cassian was learning, and he was understanding himself even more.
Each impact taught him something new: how to move his hands better, which angles of attack were most effective, how much force to apply depending on the enemy's reaction, which potions cushioned the impact the most, how much energy and mana to invest in each knife of darkness.
Understanding all this meant he took fewer wounds and inflicted more on the aberration.
In real time, Cassian became more agile, more lethal. Yeling's experience covered many of his shortcomings, and he was working with that, as it felt like his own experience, but it wasn't entirely perfect since, after all, he wasn't Yeling.
And during this frantic combat, he was slowly, instinctively, and consciously making these tiny corrections, which he hadn't done before.
Each movement became more concise, more efficient; each clash more precise. Cassian could anticipate the aberration's response, read its movements, and react before the enemy even began its attack.
Each clash, each cut, and each block was not just combat: it was accelerated learning.
All of this converged on Cassian finding the perfect moment and acting quickly.
Instead of blocking the aberration's attacks, he dodged them by a slight margin.
Bang!
That same margin brought him dangerously close to the creature and connected a strong knee to its abdomen, which caused the aberration to come slightly off the ground.
Not stopping there, and knowing that something like that was useless, Cassian spun swiftly on his axis, using the momentum from the spin to...
BANG!!
Execute a powerful upward kick. The aberration was literally sent flying with brutal force, unable to do anything to stop it.
Cassian looked up, following the rising aberration.
At that moment, controlling the darkness, he launched several shadow swords aimed mainly at his three limbs with sapling.
Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!
"jijjijijiijji"
The shadow swords were repelled by the aberration. The saplings were definitely in a problematic place, difficult to reach. It was the embodiment of the idea that the best defense is a good offense.
I have to do something more decisive and do it quickly. That wolf is getting annoying. Hmm... Oh! I can try that.
Cassian understood that he was in a bad situation and had to finish quickly, so he quickly thought of something. He didn't know if it would work, but he would try.
At that moment, he sank into his shadow, trying to move upward, toward where the creature was flying.
But as he did so, he sensed that the aberration was about to try the same thing. He couldn't allow that; he had to stop it.
During all that time, it wasn't just the compression of his body... Cassian was understanding more about darkness and shadows, even more than Yeling knew.
She had her perspective, but with their thoughts now together that perspective was widening.
The darkness was malleable, as if it were not bound to a single state of matter, or to logic itself. Perhaps it was magic, perhaps something else.
He did not know for sure.
Where Yeling came from, the word "magic" did not exist; for her, all her control and knowledge was self-taught, a skill born of will, imagination, and feelings.
So there was really nothing concrete to rely on regarding what they were doing with darkness and shadows; everything was intuitive and based on what they believed.
Originally, Cassian felt that darkness and shadows were like an extension of himself, because that's what Yeling had always felt.
But during the previous clash, when he controlled the limbs that were truly part of himself, he understood the difference between the rest of the darkness and the darkness surrounding his body.
It was not an extension; it was more like an obedient servant that fulfilled his wishes willingly, almost happy to be used.
Instead, that also made him clearly understand what he had felt during the previous struggle for control.
If the darkness obeyed him faithfully, the aberration used another tactic, as if imposing its will, forcing the darkness to act under threat even if it did not want to.
But that made the things they could do limited, which explained why, in addition to movement, the aberrations could not use the darkness to its full extent as he could.
The aberrations could barely force it to perform a single action.
Of course, there must have been an equal clash between obeying Cassian's request and being forced to act by the aberrations, and that was what he had felt briefly before.
Although it really had no consciousness, in a sense the darkness had to decide whom to obey, and it always obeyed the aberration.
It was then that Cassian wondered what the problem was and came to a conclusion.
It wasn't that his mana was less, nor his strength, much less his control of darkness and shadows.
No: the point was that he wasn't making it clear to the darkness that his request—no, his order—took precedence over anything else; even if they were threatened, they had to comply with what he wanted.
It was a matter of mindset, and when he understood that and saw that the aberration wanted to escape its predicament using shadow, a simple phrase came out of his mouth...
"That won't happen."